Stowmarket in Suffolk

Visit Stowmarket and the surrounding villages and stay in bed & breakfast accommodation:

Stowmarket, Suffolk, is a small market town almost halfway between Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds on the A45 road, at the junction with the east-west road from Framlingham to south The Church of SS Peter and Paul contains a number of monuments to the Tyrell family, some grotesque carvings on the bench-ends and a rare wrought-iron wig stand dated 1675.

The railway station, built in 1849, is in the Victorian mock-Elizabethan style. The area around the market place has many buildings of the early 19th century and late Georgian periods while Stow Lodge Hospital in Onehouse Road was built as a workhouse c. 1777.

It was to Stowmarket that John Milton came to visit his tutor Thomas Young, who lived in the vicarage and is buried in the church near the lectern; here, too, George Crabbe spent some of his school days. The Tyrell family lived at Lynton House between the church and the site of the railway station.

The Abbot's Hall Museum of Rural Life in East Anglia is an admirable and essential collection, a visit to which will take you back to the days when farming was a simple family affair and when individual craftsmanship was of a high order.